


Antitype

by englishable



Category: La Passe-Miroir | The Mirror Visitor - Christelle Dabos
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:01:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26714893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Thorn finds his fiancee's presence insistent and pervasive in more ways than one; those stray hairs she leaves absolutely everywhere are simply one horn of the dilemma
Relationships: Ophélie/Thorn (La Passe-Miroir)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 77





	Antitype

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to @oruals on tumblr both for putting me onto this series in a time when I welcomed the escapism and for drawing the art (https://oruals.tumblr.com/post/630090991547908096/thinking-about-that-coat-ophelia-borrowed-plus) from which this ramble drew its inspiration

…

He apprehends the first transgressor while spreading out his bearskin cloak to dry it, holding it open before the volcanic heat of an ancient and curmudgeonly coal-gas stove. The autumn rainwater of Anima slips onto his shoes and puddles the floorboards that have, at last, ceased their hysterical quavering, now that the cavalcade of imbeciles who are shortly marked to become his in-laws have finally retired for the evening. **  
**

Thorn drapes the cloak heavily over his bended arm, smoothing it flat, and from within its polar-star white the stove’s fireshine strikes a glint off something dark. 

His account-keeping fingers seek it out to pull it free; it is a single long, curling brown hair, and it sways in the drafts like a rambling vine while he studies it. 

Thorn pauses. He recalls her — Ophelia, like that girl from some fragmentary forgotten tale of the old world, Ophelia who fell from a willow tree that grew aslant a brook and drowned — being hurtled forward against him as a greeting. He supposes the morose, luckless child could not have otherwise been prevailed upon to introduce herself in a civilized manner, and he supposes as well that it was one of those aforementioned familial imbeciles who had sought this means of social remedy. Her wan little face had hardly come above his ribcage and the steel rims of her fogged glasses had gotten skewed atop her flat, dullard’s nose. 

He doubts anyone would envy her position. 

Thorn creaks the stove door open and flicks the hair onto the glowering red-gold coals. It vanishes in a flash. He closes the stove’s damper and lays down but does not sleep. 

The hair, in retribution, returns with reinforcements. 

The girl delivers her lime-blossom tea to his airship cabin and long after she goes Thorn bends down, his joints aching from a vigil of cramped meditation, to pluck a hair out of the carpet where she has dropped it — you don’t know me, sir — in her judicious leave-taking. He yanks one from the damask armchair they sit her down in, the day she returns to the manor battered by her encounter with Freya — your warnings, they were just words to me — and informs him quite sanely that she escaped with the collusion of a back door whose lock she has tamed. He discovers a hair snagged on the silver braiding of a coat, the morning after she enters through his wardrobe wearing a stranger’s face and a lady’s shift — the future you’re offering me simply doesn’t appeal to me — and departs in the same manner. Gusts from the broken window blow her hairs wildly about his office, the night she nearly walks straight into the barrel of his aimed pistol and keeps walking forward nonetheless — who did that to you? — to rummage for a first aid kit. A hair clings to the collar of his sodden coat when he kisses her out on the ramparts, and in return she delivers him a slap across the face — I didn’t want, you shouldn’t have — that he has admittedly been courting far more adroitly than anything else. Loose hairs come away between his fumbling, ministering fingers as he clutches her to him, several feet from Melchior’s dead body — who is God? — after she has sobbed out her grief and anger and remorse against his chest. 

The hairs are as incorrigible as that covetous scarf and as pervasive as that baffling power she has to awaken the pin-and-scroll mantel clocks, the cut-glass decanters filled with red wine, the gilded teacups and the fountain pens and the other, various locks that would otherwise bar her way into places where she does not belong, quickening whatever tracery souls their makers and possessors and users have left behind. 

Ophelia’s eyes sometimes follow the scars that lay on his face and arms like a pale rime of frost, all the places where his body has chronicled its violences and violations, and Thorn feels something shudder awake within him, too. 

Please forgive me, he tells her, and it echoes down through the hollow places inside him. Please forgive me.

(He holds her until the last allotted second, leaps through his inverted self mirrored in the walls of his prison and goes free, and when he finds a long, dark hair clinging to a button of his bloodied shirt he cries and cries and cries like a child at the first, bright shock of coming into the world.) 

…


End file.
